Biscuits For Your Valentine

Hello there! As promised, a little something for Valentine's Day, which is only a week away. Of course you can make these at any time - I just wanted to play with my new heart shaped cookie cutters. Make round ones and call them Jammy Dodgers, or star shaped ones at Christmas time, egg or bunny shapes for Easter...there are as many variations as there are cookie cutter shapes. My mother-in-law, Jean, gave me this recipe recently and she calls them Anglesey biscuits. She makes them often and they are always buttery, softly crumbly and sweet. 

You will need:

225g/8oz unsalted butter

110g/4oz caster sugar

350g/12oz self raising flour

½ teaspoon salt

raspberry jam

icing sugar for dusting

• Pre-heat the oven to 180°C/350°F
• In a mixer, cream together the butter and sugar. 
• Add the flour and mix well. It will look like breadcrumbs at this stage. 
• Get in there with your hands and mix/knead until a dough comes together. It is a  rather crumbly dough to begin with, but the more you roll and work the dough, the easier it becomes.
• Roll out to roughly ¼ inch or ½ cm thick and cut out an even number of shapes. Half of these will be your bottoms - put those to one side. 
• Using a smaller matching cookie cutter, cut a hole in the centre of the other half of your biscuits to make the tops. 
• Bake for 7 or 8 minutes on a baking tray/cookie sheet. You want quite a pale colour. 
• When they are cool, spread jam onto the bottom halves of your biscuits and sandwich together. 

You can leave them pale and interesting, or sprinkle icing sugar on the tops before placing them on to their jam covered partners. The icing sugar is a good way to hide any, ahem, slightly too brown biscuits, which is NOT what happened to me, I promise.

Ours will be a low-key Valentine's celebration - assuming John remembers, of course, otherwise it might be quite a high stress occasion. But he's never forgotten yet. I did once forget our wedding anniversary, something John has never let me live down, but in my defence I was two or three months pregnant with Bella at the time. We always exchange cards and usually a little present like a new book or cd. We'll eat something nice at home and share a bottle of wine and probably do something incredibly exciting like watch an episode of Borgen.